Klaipėdos universitetas

The article provides an overview of the emergence of the term ethnic culture, analysing how the notion of ethnic culture is understood in the ethnology of Western countries, and how it is interpreted by the creators of ethnos theory. In Lithuania, not only cultural workers but also scholars and researchers understand ethnic culture very differently. In order to dispense with the chaotic and extremely varied understanding of ethnic culture in Lithuania, the author offers several possible ways out: 1) if most ethnologists and cultural workers in Lithuania have accepted the fundamental postulate of ethnos theory, recognising that ethnic culture can be discerned from the entirety of the culture of the nation, then the notion of ethnic culture existing in the theory of ethnos should also be adopted; 2) if this understanding is rejected, then guidance should be taken from the theoretical approach existing in the ethnology of Western countries requiring us not to apply the notion of ethnic culture when discussing cultures of nations.

Contemporary humanities and social sciences often use to focus on mutual relationship between an individual and community for the search for “oneself” and attempts to understand “the other”, as well as on comparison of identities encountering each other. New research in the fields of ethnology claims that we should look for definitions of the contemporary national identities in Europe in their correlation with ethnicity. On the other hand, many interdisciplinary studies proved that it is increasingly more complicated to define ethnicity in the context of globalization. The goal of the paper is to analyze the local Klaipėda Region communities’ attitudes towards nationality in comparative perspective. It will focus on encounters in between dominant/state and local/regional discourses and identity politics.